CHAPTER 66
Brynn
Messini, Greece
Two Weeks Later
Marina had hired two university students for the summer and informed me I was no longer needed at the café every day.
She claimed it was because business had picked up.
The fact that both students had appeared within forty-eight hours of Jameson’s arrival suggested otherwise.
I hadn’t argued very hard.
For the first time since I’d met him, Jameson and I were sharing space without an extraction plan, a surveillance threat, or someone actively trying to kill us.
It turned out we were good at it.
Mostly.
He woke before me every morning. Checked the doors every night. Reorganized the kitchen after discovering Marina stored three different types of flour in identical unlabeled containers.
His shirts had begun appearing beside my dresses in the bedroom. His razor sat near my toothbrush. The coffee was always ready before I opened my eyes.
Instead of taste, we now complained about decaf, although I kept reminding him he could still have regular.
He still tracked every sound outside the cottage, but he no longer reached for a weapon when Leo called through the open window.
Progress.
That morning, Leo had arrived shortly after breakfast and asked Jameson to help him collect something from a neighbor.
Neither of them had told me what.
Jameson had kissed my forehead, glanced at the laptop open on the table, and reminded me I had agreed to take the morning off.
I waited until they reached the road before reopening the document.
The exposé had existed as fragments for days. Notes, names, timelines, and pieces of testimony that did not yet form a story.
Mirrorstream.
The Gemini Protocol.
Serpens Geminus.
Ingrid Sarv, and how she was really Tomar Rana, an operative with Research and Analysis Wing, India’s external intelligence agency.
The identities rewritten. The people erased. The governments and private clients that had paid for access while pretending the system did not exist.
Jameson and I had already agreed on the limits.
If we ever wanted to return to the United States, the CIA stayed out of it. His involvement would be attributed to a confidential source with direct knowledge of the system, and nothing in the article could identify him as anything more.
Everything else was going into the light.
We had enough to publish.
What we didn’t have was enough to prosecute.
My reporting could prove Mirrorstream existed. The people whose identities had been altered could prove what it had done to them. Jameson could explain how the system worked without identifying himself as anything more than a confidential source.
But none of it placed Tomar’s hand on the commands.
For that, we needed original records. Authenticated logs. Financial transfers. Something that connected individual orders to the person who had given them.
Rook was searching for it.
We had sent her everything we knew about the remaining archives two days earlier and received nothing beyond confirmation that she had begun looking.
We weren’t waiting to publish. Perfect evidence had a way of disappearing before anyone could use it.
But if Rook found what we suspected still existed, the exposé wouldn’t only expose them.
It could put them in prison.
The difficulty was deciding where the truth began.
I deleted the first paragraph for the fourth time.
The front door opened before either of them knocked.
Leo backed into the cottage first, carrying one end of a wooden crib.
Jameson followed with the other.
I pushed back from the table. “Oh my God.”
Leo looked over his shoulder. “That reaction sounds promising.”
“This is so great.” I crossed the room, already smiling. “Where did you find it?”
“Eleni knew a woman whose granddaughter outgrew it,” Leo said. “Apparently, this village has been preparing for the baby longer than you have.”
I lowered my voice. “Shh. Don’t spook him, or he’ll get out the spreadsheets.”
Jameson’s eyes shifted to me. “The spreadsheets already exist.”
Leo laughed.
They maneuvered the crib through the doorway and lowered it carefully near the bedroom wall. The wood settled against the tile with a soft scrape.
I ran my hand along the smooth rail. It was older, but well kept. Solid. Real.
A place for her to sleep.
Leo rested both hands on his hips. “She’ll weigh, what, three kilos? Four?”
“Approximately,” Jameson said.
Leo gestured toward the crib. “Then I think it will survive.”
“That is not a structural argument,” Jameson said.
Leo stared at him for a second, then laughed and slapped him once on the shoulder. “All right, file mou.” My friend.
Jameson looked at the hand still resting on him, then at Leo.
Leo removed his hand, still smiling. “I’ll get my tools. We can tighten everything before Marina tells us we did it wrong.”
“She will,” I said.
“She already said we would.” He headed back toward the door. “I’ll be ten minutes.”
The door closed behind him.
Jameson checked the crib once more before turning toward me.
His attention moved past me to the laptop and the pages spread across the table.
“You started,” he said.
“I told you I was going to.”
His gaze returned to the open document. “You also said you were taking the morning off.”
“I lied.”
“That was apparent,” he said.
I walked back to the table and sat.
He came up behind me, one hand settling on the back of my chair as he read over my shoulder. His warmth pressed along my back, familiar now in a way I still wasn’t used to.
The screen held three paragraphs and more crossed-out sentences than usable ones.
“I can’t decide where to begin,” I said.
He read the screen for a long moment. “You’re trying to tell everything.”
“I am telling everything. That’s the point.”
His gaze stayed on the document. “You can’t.”
I leaned back in my chair. “That’s deeply inconvenient.”
“It is also true,” he said.
I sighed.
He rested one hand on the back of my chair, reading the page again. “If you explain every piece, people will lose the thread.”
“If I don’t, they’ll think I’m making it up.”
His eyes moved to mine. “They’ll think that regardless.”
“That wasn’t encouraging.”
“It wasn’t intended to be,” he said.
Silence settled while his eyes moved over the page again.
Finally, he tapped one paragraph with the back of his finger. “This one.”
I frowned. “Why?”
“Because you stopped trying to explain it,” he said.
I looked back at the paragraph.
He leaned closer to the screen. “You simply told the truth.”
I read it again.
He was right.
It wasn’t the most organized paragraph.
It wasn’t the one that explained the most.
It was the one that made me angry enough to stop writing like a journalist and start writing like someone who had lived through it.
“That’s actually really good advice.”
I reached back, caught the front of his shirt, and tugged him down until his face was close to mine.
His mouth shifted. “I have those moments.”
“Very occasionally.”
I kissed him before he could answer.
It was soft. Familiar. The kind of kiss that no longer felt borrowed from stolen time.
The front door swung open.
I pulled back with a groan. “We’re absolutely getting a lock.”
Leo stopped in the doorway with the toolbox in one hand. “I’d also like to remind you that I said I’d be back in ten minutes.”
I blinked at him.
“Yeah. Ask Marina what she walked in on when we were teenagers at the old olive press.”
He looked toward the ceiling and released a deep sigh. “Marina scared the tourist half to death, claimed she was scarred for life, and I never saw that girl again.”
I laughed.
Jameson left the table and crouched near one of the lower supports.
Leo handed him the drill. “That one is already tight.”
“It can be tighter,” Jameson said.
Leo looked at me. “Does he always do this?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I heard that,” Jameson said.
“You were meant to,” I said.
Leo laughed and opened the toolbox.
I turned back to the laptop.
The cursor blinked against the empty page.
People did not have to die to disappear.
I typed the sentence, then stopped and read it twice.
The drill sounded behind me.
“That bracket is misaligned,” Jameson said.
“It is not misaligned,” Leo replied.
“It is three millimeters off-center,” Jameson said.
Leo made a sound beneath his breath. “She weighs less than a sack of flour.”
“That remains irrelevant,” Jameson said.
I smiled at the screen.
People did not have to die to disappear.
The sentence stayed.
Behind me, Jameson and Leo argued quietly over the placement of a support bracket for a crib the baby would probably never sleep in.
Between the two of them, me, Marina, Leo’s mother, Eleni, and the rest of their family, she was far more likely to spend her first months being passed from one set of waiting arms to another.
For the first time, the story did not feel too large to begin.
I placed the cursor at the end of the sentence and kept writing.